Resources
Online Support
“Dr. John Raible has been educating audiences about transracial adoption for more than thirty years. He began speaking to adoptive parents in the 1970s as a teen panelist at regional and national adoption conferences. He is one of the adult adoptees featured in the widely-shown 1998 documentary film Struggle for Identity: Issues in Transracial Adoption. More recently, he was a returning cast member for the award-winning 2007 Struggle for Identity: A Conversation 10 Years Later.”
Adopted and Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora (AFAAD MN)
“Who is AFAAD? AFAAD is one of the first adoptee led organizations specifically for adoptees and foster alums of African descent. We are from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds. As adult Black adoptees, we are domestic adoptees, we are transracial and international, we are those who survived foster care systems across the world, we are those adopted and raised by members of our own families. We are adopted to London from the U.S., to Sweden from Ghana, we are mixed Korean and Black, Caribbean, Afro-Latino, we are adopted to isolation and to diverse cities across the U.S. We are international and multilingual. We are multi-cultural, multi-racial – we are the diaspora.
AFAAD believes providing connections for and creating space to make visible the adoption and foster community in Black/ African diasporic cultures worldwide will give support to those who otherwise remain isolated in their experiences. As adoptees and fosters ourselves, we believe coming together, even simply to hear one another’s stories and experiences, is a powerful tool for those of us who have for so long felt we are alone.”
“AdopSource is a unique non-profit organization that serves the international adoption community. We provide a means for adoptees, their families, adoptee organizations, and the greater community to connect and learn through collective resources about heritage, cultures, and identity. Our organization supports and values a healthy and informed community of adoptees, their families, and the greater community”.
This blog was born in March of 2006 as a way for the author, JaeRan Kim, to put down her thoughts about international and transracial adoption from a point of view that is often missing – the adoptee themselves. As a social worker in the field of adoptions, and having spent a lot of time volunteering or working with adoptees, and having the benefit of a social work education, JaeRan wanted to connect-the-gaps in what she saw as an adoptive parent and adoption professional dominant discourse around adoption.
Adoption Mosaic is a non-profit organization providing educational resources and ongoing support to all those whose lives are influenced by adoption. Not all topics are about adoptees, but the adoptee perspective is much represented.
Books / Print Support
In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
By Rhonda M. Roorda
“Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.”
In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees
By Rhonda M. Roorda
“Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories shared the experiences of twenty-four black and biracial children who had been adopted into white families in the late 1960s and 70s. The book has since become a standard resource for families and practitioners, and now, in this sequel, we hear from the parents of these remarkable families and learn what it was like for them to raise children across racial and cultural lines.
These candid interviews shed light on the issues these parents encountered, what part race played during thirty plus years of parenting, what they learned about themselves, and whether they would recommend transracial adoption to others. Combining trenchant historical and political data with absorbing firsthand accounts, Simon and Roorda once more bring an academic and human dimension to the literature on transracial adoption.”
Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew
By Sherrie Eldridge
“The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children’s unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame.
With warmth and candor, Sherrie Eldridge reveals the twenty complex emotional issues you must understand to nurture the child you love–that he must grieve his loss now if he is to receive love fully in the future–that she needs honest information about her birth family no matter how painful the details may be–and that although he may choose to search for his birth family, he will always rely on you to be his parents.
Filled with powerful insights from children, parents, and experts in the field, plus practical strategies and case histories that will ring true for every adoptive family, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew is an invaluable guide to the complex emotions that take up residence within the heart of the adopted child–and within the adoptive home.”
By Adam Chau and Kevin Ost-Vollmers
Through fourteen chapters, the authors of Parenting As Adoptees give readers a glimpse into a pivotal phase in life that touches the experiences of many domestic and international adoptees – that of parenting. The authors, who are all adoptees from various walks of life, intertwine their personal narratives and professional experiences, and the results of their efforts are insightful, emotive, and powerful. As Melanie Chung-Sherman, LCSW, LCPAA, PLLC, notes:
“Rarely has the experience of parenting as an adopted person been laid to bare so candidly and vividly. The authors provide a provocative, touching and, at times visceral and unyielding, invitation into their lives as they unearth and piece together the magnitude of parenting when it is interwoven with their adoption narrative. It is a prolific piece that encapsulates the rawness that adoption can bring from unknown histories, abandonment, grief, and identity reconciliation which ultimately reveals the power of resiliency and self-determination as a universal hallmark in parenting.”
Webinar Options
Passages: A Lifetime Perspective on the Developmental Tasks of Adopted Persons
Social work doctoral student and South Korean adoptee, Jae Ran Kim discusses the model created by researchers David Brodzinsky, Marshall Schecter and Robin Marantz Henig created to reflect how developmental tasks of adoptees differ from those of non-adoptees and how it affects adoptees throughout a lifespan. Kim also discusses the subject of ambiguous loss for people within the adoption community.
Part 1 & 2 – The Skin I Live In: Transracial Adoptees Speak on Adoption
Robert O’Connor, Julie Hart, Amy Fjellman and Sandy White Hawk talk in-depth about the experiences associated with transracial adoption.
